Is NAQT planning on using the same scheduling as in previous years, even with more teams attending this tournament? By that i mean the standard 10 preliminary games with multiple byes, and accepting every team 6-4 and better into the playoffs.

Reminder that today is the no-penalty drop deadline; if you would like to cancel your team's HSNCT registration, please contact us as soon as possible.

naqt.com wrote:As of 23:59:59 ET on April 27, 2012, the acceptance of invitations will be considered final. Should a team cancel after that date, it will still be liable for one-half of its base registration fee.

Communi-Bear Silo State wrote:Chris Chiego and I will be running the blog and liveblog for this year's HSNCT, which can be found here.

Will there be games webcast on iHigh like there were last year?

Jonathan GrahamBeavercreek HS 1999-2003, Ohio State 2003-2007, Wright State (possibly playing)2012-2015moderator/scorekeeper at some tournaments in Ohio, and sometimes elsewhere"Ohio has a somewhat fractured quizbowl circuit, with a few small pockets of intense competition (like in Mahoning County) and with the rest scattered around the state."-Chris Chiego

I have a question about buzzers. Has anyone had a problem with getting them through security with carry-on luggage? I am wondering as we bringing buzzers for the first time. Thanks for any advice or suggestions!

trackman32 wrote:I have a question about buzzers. Has anyone had a problem with getting them through security with carry-on luggage? I am wondering as we bringing buzzers for the first time. Thanks for any advice or suggestions!

I've generally not had problems taking buzzers on a plane. I've brought them with me in their own container and packed with my other stuff and it's been fine.

Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:Here are the morning pools. Each pool will produce one 4-0 team, four 3-1 teams, six 2-2 teams, four 1-3 teams, and one 0-4 team. The pools only hold for the morning matches.

Does it then split into straight power matching for the remaining six games?

For what it's worth, based entirely on what I heard today and without pouring over the questions in scrutiny, I believe that this might have been the absolute best set of questions I've ever heard. It was definitely the best set of HSNCT questions in my opinion. Kudos to NAQT for putting this set together.

Lee HenryAP English TeacherQuiz Bowl CoachWest Point High School Cullman, AL

Aaron Goldfein wrote:I'm curious, why does NAQT have double byes in the winners bracket, and how do they determine how many teams get them?

Good question. The best way to answer it (and pardon the length here) involves the conceptual differences between NAQT's playoff bracket and a standard 64-team double elimination bracket (i.e. what you'd find if you googled that term).

Most obviously we have way more than 64 teams at 6-4 or better; this year, 91 to be exact*. Everyone reading this forum is probably familiar with the route we took here: All teams at exactly 6-4 are already on the brink of elimination. That buys us some space: For example, if your first playoff round has 64-N teams in the Winners' bracket and 2N teams already in the Losers' bracket, you're a round of obvious pairings away from having 32 teams in each bracket. Unfortunately starting this year we have too many teams to hit 32 + 32. (I've realized this since the plane ride back from '11 HSNCT.)

My next approach there was to aim for 24 + 48 (arbitrary round numbers), where eight teams would get second-round byes, so that we'd begin the *third* playoff round at 16 + 32. The first draft of the playoff bracket actually did that. Second-round byes sound odd, but if teams who get those byes also had first-round byes... well, those would be the very best teams in the field anyway. Coincidentally I've heard the (quite reasonable) complaint that in past years teams that went 8-2 or 9-1 didn't have all that big a pairing advantage over 7-3 teams.

What we found was that some teams would get second-round byes who hadn't had first-round byes; and more notably, this means that a big underdog could upset its way to a bye even though a team seeded immediately above that underdog team wouldn't have that opportunity. So having exactly six teams get second-round byes turned out to be the sweet spot where we avoid that problem.

*- EDIT: We know now that it's 91. Before the Saturday games actually happened there was a range of possibilities; I gave Harry White the exact #s from an e-mail thread yesterday (this morning?), and David Reinstein also has those #s.

Matt BruceNational Academic Quiz TournamentsHarvard '96, Boston University School of Law '99

Can you please fix the huge problem in the card system that led to NKC literally having four matchups against teams that had one more win than them? They went 5-5 with an absurdly difficult schedule, mostly because they played DCC, Oakland Mills, Ardsley, AND Hawken when their records weren't the same. Four games. That's insane and speaking as an alum I'm pretty upset for them. I get it, imbalanced matches have to happen. But why can't you at least make sure it only happens once for each team? How on EARTH did it happen to the same team FOUR times?

Charlie Dees, North Kansas City HS '08"I won't say more because I know some of you parse everything I say." - Jeremy Gibbs

"At one TJ tournament the neg prize was the Hampshire College ultimate frisbee team (nude) calender featuring one Evan Silberman. In retrospect that could have been a disaster." - Harry White

The short version of Matt's answer is that in the last year or two, NAQT has tried to move the Sunday byes to the first few rounds rather than spread them out throughout the day.

The short answer to Charlie's question is that it cannot be done. When two teams with different records play each other, then you don't know what record the card corresponds to afterwards. When a 4-0 team plays a 3-1 team, which is what happened in this case, then you don't know whether the winner of the match will be 5-0 or 4-1, and you don't know whether the loser will be 4-1 or 3-2. That uncertainty travels with the card the rest of the day, and it travels in the same direction for the rest of the day. Therefore, if a 3-2 team has a card that corresponds to a 4-1 or 3-2 record, then they have to play with that uncertainty the rest of the day. I tried to go gentle on those teams, as will be seen in my long answer below, but the only method I saw for getting rid of the problem was rejected by NAQT (see next paragraph).

This problem corresponds to having a number of teams that is not great for the system. 10 rounds of power matching works perfectly with 1024 teams and imperfectly with any other number. It works a lot better with 256 teams than 240--with 256 teams, the maximum number of uneven matches any team would have is 2, and it's very possible that no teams would even have that many. One of the suggestions I made to NAQT was that they play 240 teams on a 256 team schedule, but that suggestion was rejected because it meant having a few matches where both teams get credited with a win, which NAQT did not want to do. The upside of such a system would have been that no team would have been put in NKC's situation.

Another point I want to make, just to make sure everyone is clear on this, is that no team was targeted to get a difficult schedule. When I made the card schedule, I had no idea which team was going to be assigned to which card. Matt Bruce wrote a Perl program that randomly assigned teams to card numbers in a way that took seeding into account so that elite teams didn't play each other for the first few rounds. (The tournament was actually seeded completely, and the randomness is done so that the seeds are hidden.) Also, had NKC gotten to 3-1 in any order other than WLWW, this would not have happened to them. I'm not blaming them--I'm just making clear that they were not targeted.

I will now give a long answer to Charlie's question. Before I do so, I have laid out the card schedule for everybody here. If people want to fill in the results, that's great, but only do so if you can do it well: make sure you understand how the spreadsheet is set up and how the card system works, use full names of teams (copy and paste is recommended), and put the team that has the left card number on the left and the right card number on the right. Unlike last year's Google Doc, this does not advance teams automatically.

After each team had played four matches, there were 15 teams that were 4-0, so one of them had to play a 3-1 team. NKC had the misfortune of being that 3-1 team, and they lost to 4-0 DCC A.

After each team had played five matches, there were 2 cards that had records of either 4-1 or 3-2. One was NKC's, and the other belonged to Oakland Mills. Oakland Mills was the lucky counterpart to unlucky NKC. While 3-1 NKC was losing to a 4-0 team, 3-1 Oakland Mills was beating a 2-2 team (Georgetown B). Going strictly by the card system (meaning that I am not judging their strength but just looking at the card schedule), Oakland Mills should have been either the weakest 4-1 team or one of the strongest 3-2 teams. In fact, the card system had NKC ranked slightly higher, and NKC won the match.

After six matches, NKC had a card that could have belonged to a 5-1 or 4-2 team, and they were in fact 4-2. The only other such card was the 8 card, which had just lost to the 2 card (held by 5-1 DCC A, who had just lost to Hunter A). Because there were 21 cards that belonged to teams known to be 5-1, and there were an even number of cards that were at least potentially better than 5-1, a known 5-1 team had to play down. If they played a known 4-2 team, it would have increased the number of uncertain cards, which would have increased the overall number of mismatched games and the potential number of playoff teams. (Increasing playoff teams could increase the number of Sunday rounds, which NAQT does not want to do so that teams can sleep Sunday morning and catch planes Sunday night.) Furthermore, there was no way for me to assign NKC's card to an opponent which I knew would have the same record, since I didn't know what record NKC's card would correspond to--if Oakland Mills had won their match, then the card would have belonged to a 5-1 team. I didn't want the 5-1 team to play the 8 card, which potentially could have belonged to a 4-2 team that had played a brutal schedule, so I picked what should have been the weakest known 5-1 team and had them play NKC. This turned out to be Ardsley, and I have no idea whether or not they were in fact the weakest such team--I just tried to pick the weakest such card, which often does not correspond to the weakest such team.

After NKC lost to Ardsley, it played Belvidere North A. Both teams had cards that could have been 5-2 or 4-3, and both teams were in fact 4-3.

After eight matches, NKC had a card that corresponded to either 5-3 or 4-4, and once again I needed a team to play down. The decision as to which team should play up was based to some extent on avoiding the possibility of repeat matches as much as possible. NKC played the weakest card belonging to a team that was definitely 5-3, which turned out to be Hawken, who had to win twice to get from 3-3 to 5-3. Looking at Hawken's performance, they were the toughest luck 5-3 team rather than the weakest, with their 3 losses by a combined 50 points and their wins by about an average of 300 points, but that's not something that could have been seen when I was making the schedule.

After that loss, NKC had a match with the weakest known 4-5 card, but by then it was too late to make the playoffs, and they won to finish 5-5.

David ReinsteinPACE President, Head Writer and Editor for Scobol Solo and Masonics (Illinois), TD for New Trier Scobol Solo and New Trier Varsity, Writer for NAQT, IHSSBCA Board Member, IHSSBCA Chair (2004-2014), New Trier Coach (1994-2011)